Quake kills 208 in Pakistan, creates new island in sea

Pedestrians and office workers leave an office building in Karachi after a powerful 7.8-magnitude earthquake hit southwestern Pakistan on Tuesday.

The death toll from a powerful earthquake in southwestern Pakistan rose to at least 208 people on Wednesday after hundreds of houses collapsed in a remote mountainous area, a local official said.

"We have started to bury the dead," said Abdul Rasheed Gogazai, the deputy commissioner of Awaran, the most affected district in Baluchistan province. He said at least 373 people were wounded.

A major earthquake hit a remote part of western Pakistan on Tuesday, with tremors were felt as far away as the Indian capital of New Delhi, hundreds of miles (kilometers) to the east, where buildings shook, as well as the sprawling port city of Karachi in Pakistan.

The United States Geological Survey said the 7.8 magnitude quake struck 145 miles (235 km) southeast of Dalbandin in Pakistan's quake-prone province of Baluchistan, which borders Iran.

The earthquake was so powerful that it caused the seabed to rise and create a small, mountain-like island about 600 meters (yards) off Pakistan's Gwadar coastline in the Arabian Sea.

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Television channels showed images of a stretch of rocky terrain rising above the sea level, with a crowd of bewildered people gathering on the shore to witness the rare phenomenon.

Officials said scores of mud houses were destroyed by aftershocks in the thinly populated mountainous area near the quake epicenter in Baluchistan, a huge barren province of deserts and rugged mountains.

Abdul Qadoos, deputy speaker of the Baluchistan assembly, told Reuters that at least 30 percent of houses in the impoverished Awaran district had caved in.

The local deputy commissioner in Awaran, Abdul Rasheed Gogazai, and the spokesman of Pakistan's Frontier Corps involved in the rescue effort said at least 45 people had been killed.